What time is it in Lebanon? What had been previously a straightforward question has over the past two days become a confusing one because of Lebanon’s dysfunctional politics. After destroying its national currency, the Lebanese state’s new target seemed to be time itself.
Since 1998, Lebanon has switched to daylight saving time (or summer time) on the last Sunday in March. This year, the caretaker government of Najib Mikati was considering postponing this one-hour leap forward for four weeks in order to accommodate the Islamic lunar month of Ramadan. What the move would do is ensure that when Muslims broke their fast at sunset during Ramadan, they would have been saved an hour of fasting. However, after considering matters, the council of ministers decided against such a step. This made sense because of the technical difficulties that would have ensued, not least that much of Europe also advances its clocks an hour on the same day.
In a connected world, when a government is planning to change its usual time schedule, it informs the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) ahead of the decision, so that the appropriate adjustments can be made in the Time Zone Database. IANA informs everyone around the world of the country’s schedule change and ensures that, among other things, official documents have timestamps indicating when they were created and updated. Lebanon had not planned to adopt such a measure when the Mikati government initially discussed the issue, so all the signs were that it would change to summer time as usual on March 26.
However, three days before that date, Mikati announced that Lebanon would delay implementation of summer time until April 21 after all. No explanation was given, however local media outlets received the video of a conversation between Mikati and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, in which Berri requested that Mikati delay the introduction of summer time so that Muslims could end their Ramadan fast earlier.
Berri, a Shia Muslim and one of Hezbollah’s primary allies, has been speaker since 1992, and has considerable influence in the system. Mikati, a Sunni Muslim, has been a caretaker prime minister since May 2022, when Lebanon held parliamentary elections, after which the country’s political forces were too divided to form a government. However, the country has been unable to elect a Maronite Christian president since October 2022, when Michel Aoun left office. Little did Mikati and Berri realize that their decision would provoke strong sectarian recrimination.
The autarchic decision to shift Lebanon to Berri-Mikati Time was made on a Thursday, in a week that had featured multiple controversies. This made some reformist parliamentarians wonder whether the decision was actually designed to be a distraction. One of the controversies was the announcement that the caretaker government planned to build a new terminal at Beirut’s Rafiq al-Hariri International Airport, and had awarded the contract without a formal bidding process.
Another controversy was that an International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission visiting Beirut held a press conference on Thursday, during which it accused the Lebanese authorities of being “very slow” in their implementation of an IMF program. The mission chief warned that Lebanon would “be mired in a never-ending crisis” if it did not implement reforms rapidly. Even though Lebanese officials and the IMF signed a staff-level agreement about a year ago, the state has done almost nothing since that time. Lebanon’s national currency, the pound, has lost 98 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar since 2019, crippling the economy, causing massive inflation, widespread poverty, and a wave of emigration.
Whatever the reason for the Berri-Mikati decision, it is difficult to imagine that either the prime minister or speaker could have foreseen the extent of the negative reaction it would provoke. First, Lebanon’s national carrier, Middle East Airlines, announced that its flight times would not, in practice, be pulled one hour back based on Berri-Mikati Time, even if it would add a local timestamp to tickets based on the time the government had adopted. Confused yet?
By Saturday, all of Lebanon’s major Christian political groups (minus presidential hopeful Suleiman Franjieh, whom Berri has supported) released statements decrying the Berri-Mikati decision and declaring they would advance their clocks at midnight. Most of Lebanon’s television stations—except for Berri’s NBN, Hezbollah’s Al-Manar, and the government’s TéléLiban—decided they would also disobey. The popular 8:00 pm news bulletins would therefore be broadcast on summer time for a majority of viewers. Statements by Lebanon’s many Christian missionary schools were released also supporting the shift to summer time.
Finally, the Maronite Christian patriarchate announced that the Maronite Church would also disregard Berri-Mikati Time, with implications for the large network of schools and institutions it controls. With that, it seemed that sectarian divisions were emerging over time zones inside a country of around 10,000 square kilometers in size. Most Muslim institutions and institutions in Muslim-majority areas adhered to Berri-Mikati Time, while most Christian institutions and institutions in Christian-majority areas adopted summer time. Advocates of transforming Lebanon into a federal republic (or even partitioning it) along sectarian lines saw the Berri-Mikati decision as an opening to further their agenda.
By then, however, the legality of the Mikati’s unilateral decision was beginning to be seriously questioned. When the current daylight savings system was put in place in 1998, it was approved by the full council of ministers and not decided solely by the prime minister. This was not the case with Mikati’s decision, which was taken without the support of the council of ministers. As a result, on Sunday afternoon, the education minister, who is close to the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, announced that schools across Lebanon would follow summer time beginning on Monday, similar to previous years. However, after an appeal from Mikati who had called for an urgent cabinet session on March 27 to discuss the time issue, the education minister went back on his decision, allowing each school to decide on its own. Are you confused any less?
Facing mounting pressure, Mikati retracted the decision to delay summer time during this cabinet session, citing fears of sectarian polarization. He said summer time would become effective on March 30, allowing two days for state institutions to make “technical adjustments.” Yet the political and economic damage wrought by this fiasco will remain a long time in the minds of Lebanese.
During the two days when parts of Lebanon lived under Berri-Mikati Time, the situation for a majority of people was bewildering. In that bizarre interregnum, for many Lebanese the time of day depended on the politics or religious affiliation of the individuals or institutions in question. Neighbors in the same Beirut building, indeed members of the same family, could be seen operating in different time zones.
For once, however, Berri’s power move, through Mikati, was halted by collective acts of civil disobedience. That may be an encouraging sign for those who wish to see people wrestle some power away from the political cartel that rules over Lebanon’s increasingly broken political order.
